Quote collection
194 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so that they no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves."
"The problem with Antigone is that she stood up to the despot Creon, but in such a way that she ended up dying. So she bought her defiance with her death. The real question I ended up asking was, "What would it mean for Antigone to have stood up to Creon and lived?" And the only way she could have lived is if she had had a serious social movement with her. If she arrived with a social movement to take down the despot, maybe it would have taken 18 days only, like in Egypt. It's really important to be able to re-situate one's rage and destitution in the context of a social movement."
"There is a rather huge ethical difference between electing surgery and being faced with transphobic condemnation and diagnoses. I would say that the greatest risk of mutilation that trans people have comes directly from transphobia."
"It is clear that whatever language of democracy Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests."
"Visual renditions of war not only establish what can be seen, and the audio-track established what can be heard, but the photographs also "train" us in ways of focusing on targets, ways of regarding suffering and loss."
"What we need is a political and joyous alternative to the behaviorist discourse, the Christian discourse on evil or sin, and the convergence of the two in forms of gender policing that [is] tyrannical and destructive."
"People need to know who I am and where I'm coming from."
"I do situate myself in this problem of being a Jew who doesn't want to be represented by the state of Israel, a state that claims to represent all Jewish people and make me into a potential citizen."
"Because Al-Qaeda has been a non-state centered organisation, many of these scenarios do not exactly apply. These are not wars between states. And yet, it seems to me that we make a mistake if we accept the view that states are fighting terrorism, since we have abundant evidence for accepting the idea of state terrorism, and what is most urgent is to track and expose how state terrorism operates under the rubric of "democracy.""
"I think maybe the destructive pleasure got turned into the destructive pleasure of war (something we see still in the images of US soldiers urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban soldiers). Something of the pleasure in destruction gets unleashed, and then becomes part of war effort rationalised first as revenge (or justice defined as revenge). But then it takes new forms, as we see now."
"I wonder about economic sanctions, though, since that is a way that states engage in boycotts against one another."
"If you are asking whether states and state actors can only respond through revenge, then you are suggesting that diplomatic solutions are hopeless."
"I do not follow closely anymore, since there is a limit to how much heartsickness one can bear."
"The state or global forms of power that seek to protect populations considered in danger may well extend their own power through those acts of protection."
"If you speak [ about violence against Israelis], you are in an unspeakable place, have become a Nazi or its moral equivalent (if there is a moral equivalent). It certainly terrifies, but perhaps also it is a linguistic permutation of state terrorism, an assault that stops one in one's tracks, and secures the continuing operation of the regime and its monopoly on politically intelligible speech."
"I wonder whether I might have meant "terrify us" but perhaps as well there was a less than conscious effort to show that the suppression of debate about Palestine and about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement - within many academic circles - does seek to establish those who would address such issues in speech as already collaborating with "terrorist" regimes, although now only Hamas is officially terrorist according to the US government and its allies."
"Photographs can be forms of recruitment, ways of bringing the viewer into the military, as it were. In this way, they prepare us for war, even enlist us in war, at the level of the senses, establishing a sensate regime of war."
"There are surely many ways that [media select and contextualise events determine the boundaries of public thinking] happens, but we can note at the most obvious level the way in which forms of resistance or violence get cast as "conflicts" that assume two sides that are fighting only against one another."
"The idea that speaking at all on the topic, demanding public space in which to have that debate, is itself an act of complicity with violence, and violence against Israelis, understood as synonymous with Jews, and so violence against Jews, clearly stops the speech with an unspeakable allegation."
"It's not my concern. It's your concern. I just keep working. I keep posing certain questions and I think there are times when people think "What happened to the Judith Butler I used to know?" or "She's not doing gender trouble. Does that mean she refuses it or she's disavowed it?" And I would say no. I have not refused or disavowed anything."